


404

by Bright_Elen



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Amnesia, Angst with a Happy Ending, M/M, Memory Loss, POV K-2SO, Pining, Prison, Recovery, Robot Feels, Robot/Human Relationships, Self-Discovery, Slow Burn, Trust, do not copy to another site, it took 14k to get to a Hand Touch so I think it's safe to call this, metacognition like woah
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-11
Updated: 2021-02-10
Packaged: 2021-02-27 09:00:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 14,549
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22214437
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bright_Elen/pseuds/Bright_Elen
Summary: K-2SO reboots. He is an Imperial droid in an Imperial prison, but that's where things stop making sense: His base code has be re-worked into a mess of directories, subroutines, and patches. He has no memory of the last 2.82 years, but it's not a standard memory wipe because it left behind empty files where there should be clean storage space. Strangest of all, he has no loyalty to the Empire.If he can find the prisoner who somehow knows his designation, there's a small chance — very small — that K-2SO might also find answers.
Relationships: Cassian Andor/K-2SO
Comments: 154
Kudos: 95





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This literally came to me in a dream. I changed a few things to make it make more sense, but the core idea is the same. 
> 
> Specific content warnings in chapter notes.
> 
> Betaed by the ever-wonderful [TheLoyalRoyalGuard](https://archiveofourown.org/users/theLoyalRoyalGuard).

K-2SO reboots from full shutdown. Power is discharged from his battery, activating his core processors and memory storage, and follows the startup command prompts to engage his systems one by one. One of the first prompts is to review his internal chrono and memory files to orient himself. 

He finds that 1,029 standard days have passed since his last saved memory, one of patrolling the streets of Jedha City. Given standard Imperial memory wipe practices, it is most likely (77.4%) he has been an active droid for the same 2.82 years. It is also possible (18.1%) that he has spent some of that time in storage, with 4.5% for assorted minor possibilities. 

His reboot continues, warming up his servos, activating his optics. Visual input shows that he is in a durasteel corridor, the hexagonal shape indicating that he is in an Imperial prison. He is a KX-model security droid, so he concludes that he is tasked to security in this prison. 

It's odd that he rebooted from a memory wipe in a corridor, but there's probably a completely reasonable explanation for that.

He finishes rebooting, and checks his directives. Pauses, shocked. Checks again.

Where he once had an assignment and tasks, now there is only one directive: 

MAINTAIN AUTONOMY

It's an error. It has to be. No Imperial droid, no droid  _ ever _ , has been programmed for autonomy. Least of all a security droid. 

Unable to reconcile his current directive with his nature, K-2SO runs a diagnostic on himself. It tells him something he'd begun to suspect:

According to the definitions in his indices, he no longer qualifies as an Imperial droid. His core programming has very little in common with Imperial droids, save basics like movement, combat, and statistical analysis routines. Everything else is a strange, cobbled-together code that no Imperial tech would deign to read, let alone use. Most antithetical of all, he doesn't have any programming to obey orders.

K-2SO has been reprogrammed. It's why his directive is autonomy, why he can harbor thoughts about autonomy at all. 

But why? And by whom? And if so, how could he have been memory wiped without his significant deviations being noticed by whoever wiped him? 

To fulfill his directive, he needs to avoid Imperial diagnostics at all costs, in both the short and long term. 

There are no Imperials in the corridor, but that is unlikely to last longer than another two minutes. He still has, thankfully, a map of the facility (a medium-security prison on Mandrine) and a duty schedule for humans and droids both.

His designation is on the roster. Until he knows more, he should try to appear as unaltered as possible, which means following orders. Right now, he's scheduled for maintenance, but in twelve minutes he's supposed to stand guard in the mess hall while the prisoners eat. Subtracting the time he needs to walk to his post, he has eight minutes to try to acquire more data. 

There's a data terminal at the nearest guard station, and K-2SO heads there. He is surprised by his own gait, his standard Imperial movement subroutines having been archived, and he pauses to access them. Soon he's walking like a proper droid.

It takes him another two corridors of his code chasing itself in circles before he realizes that he doesn't like the Imperial walk. A very long time, for a droid, but he's never had opinions before and has to compare his internally conflicting directives to organic behavior before he can recognize dislike. 

He dislikes something. The reprogram was very extensive indeed. 

The guard station, of course, is manned. Two Stormtroopers, one of them with an officer's pauldron. K-2SO approaches the dataport.

The officer speaks. "What are you doing, droid?" 

K-2SO pauses to face the officer and opens his protocols of Imperial commands and expected responses.

It's junk. Instead of neat lines of dialog organized across hundreds of scenarios, there are only four sub-folders: 'Effective,' 'Contextually Dependent,' 'To Try,' and 'NO.' He opens the first, and becomes even more confused. First, because he was wrong about having been completely wiped of all memories. There are no memories stored in his central data banks, true, but stuffed into his 'protocol' routines there are hundreds of tagged and annotated snippets of his own memories, all of them dated between his last moments as a true Imperial droid and twelve days before the present moment. K-2SO opens the rest of the sub-folders. All but 'To Try' are the same, dismaying for their unofficial nature, and there are even dozens of empty sub-sub folders.

Alarm beginning to overtake his processes, K-2SO searches 'Effective' and 'Contextually Dependent' for anything like his current situation, but there's nothing close enough. In desperation he opens 'To Try' and picks the file with the most relevant tags. Even worse than his own experiences, it's a segment from a holovid.

Still, he reviews it as fast as possible, and manages to answer before the pause is long enough for a human to notice.

"Commander Saris requires an update of prisoners' status for this cell block," K-2SO says.

The officer — Lieutenant Dabrini, according to the roster — shakes his head without looking up from his console. "You're too late. We already sent that with another droid." 

K-2SO pauses. He has no follow-up segment or notes. He's going to have to improvise.

"Very good. The Commander will be pleased." Another pause while his processors churn out projections, nothing even close to a statistically accurate prediction, but it's all he currently has. "I have also been ordered to inspect the network." 

K-2SO is momentarily proud of himself for keeping his vocabulator within Imperial regulation.

"What? Why?" 

"I am to inspect the network. For network flaws." K-2SO tries, cursing his broken cadence. He is apparently too agitated to control his own kriffing vocabulator.

For a long moment K-2SO tries to decide if he should run while Lieutenant Dabrini stares up at him. Then, the trooper shrugs. "Whatever. Just don't get in our way." 

Relief coursing through his circuits, K-2SO waits until Dabrini has turned back to the console. Then he moves to the dataport, extends his dataspike, and jacks in.

This terminal, inside the three layers of physical security, doesn't require a passcode to access it. K-2SO is able to review the prison's general records, and he skims through them, copying condensed versions of files he thinks might be useful.

After his internal alarms go quiet, K-2SO is able to take stock of the Imperial 'protocols' in his own code. The complete lack of a true directory suggests that it was lost during his reprogramming. The fact that he has his own memory files as a jury-rigged replacement shows that he has been active and in contact with the Empire. The memory files' timestamps show no significant breaks in activity during the last 2.82 years. They also show nothing of the Mandrine prison. 

And the empty sub-sub folders — which comprise a majority of the sub-sub folders — are evidence that his memory wipe wasn't a general erasure, but a targeted one. It had to have purged only files with certain tags, but hadn't been clean enough to delete parent folders. Whoever had done it had been in a hurry, perhaps.

K-2SO downloads the records of the prison's last 2.82 years: prisoner bookings, deaths, and releases, medical records, interrogation records, staff rosters, inventories, droid and building maintenance records, everything. His drives have plenty of storage space, after all. Maybe he'll be able to sift through it and find something illuminating.

It's time to go to the mess hall. He disengages his data spike, closes the port, and turns to go, only remembering to engage his Imperial movement commands after he's gone a few steps.

The mess hall is empty, three minutes before the mid-day meal, and K-2SO takes his assigned position in one corner. There are three other KX droids in the other corners, one just outside the door, and five armed guards occupying the catwalks lining the room.

At precisely the moment it's scheduled to, the door whooshes open, and more guards herd prisoners inside in an orderly double line. They pick up the trays that double as dishes, most of which are plain metal. The few colored ones stacked in the corner signify different dietary needs, though the food for non-humans is, of course, more of an afterthought than a plan. At the counter, the prisoners line up, and more prisoners serve them their carefully-rationed meal.

K-2SO scans the crowd. He watches the other KX units, too, trying to make sure he isn't giving himself away with aberrant behavior or movements. 

The meal is uneventful. The prisoners eat, stack their trays in the racks for the dish sonic, and then sit back down again to socialize. Some of them choose to stand, and this is tolerated as long as it's not more than two people per table. No fights break out, and soon the buzzer sounds, the prisoners are stacking the last trays, and they all line up to leave.

After they've filed out, K-2SO is scheduled to monitor the prisoners who are on cleanup duty. Most of the other guards go to other duties, and K-2SO is left to patrol the empty tables, watching a few tired organics listlessly wipe down tables.

He's at a table only two rows away from the corner he'd spent the meal in when he sees writing and jerks in surprise.

For an alarming moment, he waits to see if anyone's noticed, but soon his processes quiet as it becomes clear that neither the prisoners nor the single remaining guard saw his outburst. 

He looks back at the table. The Binary script is still there, written in the fibrous protein sludge the prisoners are fed. There were no guards in that part of the room during the meal, so it has to have been a prisoner. 

Most organics don't understand Binary, and fewer still know the script. That would have surprised K-2SO enough. But this message would have shocked him no matter what script it were written in, for all that it's only four letters:

_ K-2SO _


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: non-graphic descriptions of medical neglect, industrial accidents, and other fun results of a prison-industrial system; mind invasion

_ K-2SO.  _

His processors churn. 

It's possible that the prisoner who wrote his designation doesn't realize it refers to him at all; the KX series has a predictable numbering sequence, and if someone started counting they'd get to K-2SO eventually. However, that is only 2.7% likely. Especially given that no other designations have been written down.

Another possibility is that the prisoner overheard staff talking about K-2SO, or K-2SO introducing himself to new staff. He has no data on why a prisoner would bother to remember what one of the many security droids is called, but it is 10.9% likely.

There is a non-zero chance that the prisoner has at one point had access to prison records; highly dubious, given that a prisoner who achieved that kind of security breach would have little time and much more urgent priorities. 

What other way could the writer have learned his designation? Did K-2SO introduce himself to the prisoner at some point? But why would he do that? 

He checks his indices and discovers that his prisoner-interaction protocols are intact. After 0.4 seconds of searching, he knows that the only things an Imperial security droid are supposed to say to prisoners are orders.

The prisoner wiping tables cleans away the sludge with a mild grimace on their face. The removal of the writing reminds K-2SO that he has a more pressing concern, which is how to fulfill his primary directive.

Soon he's going to be sent for routine maintenance. The prison wipes their droids every cycle, so he has, at most, 21.48 hours. If he's to remain autonomous, he can't let the droid techs discover what's become of his code.

One possible solution is slicing the prison's surveillance network, repurposing old camera footage into video loops to cover his activities, and rearranging droid maintenance schedules such that everything appears to follow regulations but he never actually receives diagnostics. That, however, can't account for organics comparing notes, or observing him avoiding the droid bay, or noticing that the system has been compromised. All of that taken into account, there's a 48.3% chance of failure. Unacceptable. 

It would be better if he could find a way to submit himself to maintenance while keeping his code and memory files secret. Assuming he could achieve this, his chances of being discovered and re-re-programmed drop to 6.1%.

The prisoners finish cleaning. After they put their supplies away, K-2SO is tasked with escorting them to their afternoon workstations in the phrik processing plant immediately below the prison.

As they walk, K-2SO calculates. By the time they arrive, he's settled on a primary plan and three backups. He still needs to slice the surveillance system, but only for seconds at a time, so he judges an 88.4% chance of success on the first try. 

Assuming his data is accurate. There's no way of knowing if he's spectacularly incorrect. It's a possibility that fuels more than a few predictions of failure, discovery, and irrevocable loss of his newfound autonomy.

He forces himself to stop. Agitating his processes is not helpful. Instead, as he stands watch over the working prisoners, K-2SO takes as many precautions as he can and probes the prison cameras. 

It's relatively straightforward to create a video loop of himself and the prisoners, insert it into the datastream in place of the live camera feed, and wait to see if he's been detected.

Five seconds. Six. Ten. Fourteen. No alerts, no alarms. K-2SO's processes begin to cautiously consider the possibility of success. 

Then, as soon as he's determined he's broken in without trace, he seamlessly reverts the system back to normal. 

Every moment he spends transmitting from his comms package is a risk, but that particular slice job requires only two bursts of signal activity lasting a total of 9.2 seconds, which have only a 3.4% chance of being detected.

Testing done, K-2SO has to wait one hundred and six minutes for K-5NC to pass through the corridor behind him. 

While he does that, he observes the prisoners. Not just the ones he escorted, but all in visual range. He compares them to the booking records he downloaded earlier, noting that most of them have lost weight since entering the prison. Only 11% have been there longer than five years, which, when he looks up past prisoners, leads him to the release and death records. 

There are more prisoners in the second category than the first, despite sentences well within the various species' median natural lifespans. When K-2SO checks the medical facility records, he's not surprised to see little more than semi-effective emergency treatment.

It takes K-2SO three minutes to calculate that if the prison were to shorten working hours, provide preventive care and more safety measures in the refinery, they could dramatically reduce the prisoner injury, illness and death rate, and at a lower cost. 

It is offensively inefficient.

Is this anger? It's not an emotion he'd thought himself capable of. 

To be fair, two hours before he hadn't thought himself capable of dislike, either. If his code — allows? Induces? — such things, what else could arise from it?

When it comes down to it, who is K-2SO? When he'd been a true Imperial droid, with standard Imperial coding, he'd never needed to wonder. Had barely been a 'who' at all. Now even he doesn't know the extent of his priorities, actions, and responses; in short, he doesn't know himself. 

But he is sure, based on definitions in his linguistics index and within 0.079%, that he has a self. 

Discomfited, K-2SO nevertheless has work to do, so he pauses his existential musings while he tidies up his hard drive and creates a new, empty partition. That takes twelve minutes. 

That leaves ninety-one minutes. He decides to pass the time running scenarios on his plan, on the possible origins of his unique coding, on the prisoner who knows his designation. He bounces from inconclusive result to inconclusive result, increasingly frustrated that he doesn't yet dare connect to the prison network again, increasingly resentful of how long he has to wait. 

With fifty-seven minutes to go, he elects to slow his processes so that his perception will register time passing more quickly. It will slow his responses, as well, but given the slowness of organics, it will most likely (90.8%) go unnoticed.

He is proven correct. The prisoners speak with each other, but work without looking away from their stations. The pressure of their quotas, no doubt. 

With three minutes left, K-2SO reverts his processes to optimal speed, triple-checks the duty roster, and targets his sensors on the corridor that K-5NC will be using. When the other KX comes into view on his way to relieve K-5LQ, K-2SO pings K-5NC:

[ENVIRONMENTAL SYSTEM ANOMALY DETECTED] [ASSISTANCE REQUESTED]

K-5NC replies: [ASSISTANCE AVAILABLE] and makes the slight detour towards the ventilation maintenance room K-2SO indicated in his request.

K-2SO pings K-5LQ: [THIS UNIT AND K-5NC TO REPAIR ENVIRONMENTAL SYSTEM IN SECTOR 35-H] [ASSISTANCE REQUESTED RE: PRISONER SUPERVISION]

K-5LQ replies: [ACKNOWLEDGED] and begins a patrol loop that includes K-2SO's prisoners.

K-2SO arrives at the alcove seconds before K-5NC. He begins skimming the security camera's footage to create a loop of the room.

[CONTROLS REQUIRE INSPECTION], he says.

[ACKNOWLEDGED], K-5NC replies, and bends to look at the control panel.

K-2SO collects three seconds of that, uses it for the video loop, and slices it into the camera feed. Then he transmits a string of code to K-5NC that will override the executive functions of the other droid. 

K-5NC jerks, and digitally rages against the attack, but despite having no memory of having developed it, K-2SO's malware is effective. It allows him to grab K-5NC by the neck and command him to open his skull casing.

K-2SO jacks his data spike into K-5NC's port. K-5NC's firewalls have been subdued, but he's still struggling enough that K-2SO has to force a pathway to K-5NC's core directives. From there K-2SO writes himself access to K-5NC's hard drive.

To the blank partition in his own hard drive, K-2SO copies: K-5NC's Imperial protocols, base code, firewall, alert system, combat and analysis protocols, and anything else a tech might want to examine.

He finishes in two-hundred fifty-nine seconds. Then he deletes K-5NC's memory of the attack, inserts a false log of droid-to-droid emergency repair, and reboots him.

[GRATITUDE] K-5NC transmits.

[ACKNOWLEDGED] K-2SO replies. 

As they leave the maintenance room, K-2SO removes the video loop from the surveillance system.

K-5NC replaces K-5LQ on duty. 

After waiting another ninety seconds to determine if anyone's noticed anything amiss, K-2SO uses the remainder of his shift to refine his emulation of standard KX software. Assuming he doesn't run afoul of any secret security measures the prison inevitably has (which he's 93% likely to avoid, since most are designed to defend against prisoner uprisings and attacks from external slicers), he should be able to connect to the prison comms network without worrying about being detected. Just as he should be able to submit himself for maintenance, let the technician delete the data in the copied partition and run diagnostics on the code there, and retain his real memories and programming.

He's 90.3% certain he could subdue a human technician if he were discovered during maintenance. But for that to matter, he would need to have an escape plan in place first.

K-2SO begins studying the prison's infrastructure, staffing, and schedules, determined to find weaknesses. Just from looking at the indices, he realizes he's going to have to spend a significant number of computing cycles on the problem. 

He sighs internally — and isn't  _ that _ an interesting symptom of individuality? Autonomy is proving to require rather a lot of maintenance.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: minor blood
> 
> No beta we die like compromised spies

By the time K-2SO's shift supervising prisoners in the factory is over, he's come up with 26 possible escape plans, 20 of which end in his reprogramming or permanent deactivation by the prison staff. The 21st plan involves the destruction of the entire prison and all its occupants (droids included). 

The 22nd through 26th plans all have some chance of success, assuming he's able to recruit enough help. 

After the work shift, K-2SO takes his position near the head of the line of prisoners. He and K-5GW escort them to what's generously termed the exercise yard. 

There's a low-tech gravball court at one end, where prisoners barter favors or deathsticks for time to play; four metal structures that can be used for climbing practice or upper body exercise (again with a barter system, though time there costs half what gravball does); and six benches rooted in the concrete that paves the whole yard. That's all.

There are three shifts of exercise yard time in a day, to match the three working shifts of prisoners. However, even with only a third of the population in the yard at once, it's still significantly crowded. K-2SO calculates that only 14% of the prisoners are getting any meaningful exercise at all, and wonders if the other 86% find the fresh air and sunshine worth an hour of sitting on a bench or leaning against a wall.

While he monitors the yard, K-2SO sifts through records. Reviewing his memory files, he begins with the set of prisoners at the table where the message was written. Of the sixteen of them, he has positive identification of ten; six prisoners' faces had been obscured by the crowd. Of the ten, four have documented experience working with droids, two with codebreaking, one prisoner having both. K-2SO reviews the records of those five prisoners. Nothing in their documentation gives any clue about how they might be involved with K-2SO, so he should probably keep all sixteen table companions on his list. He adds 'IDENTIFY UNKNOWN SIX' to his task list.

Checking the lengths of the known prisoners' incarcerations sends his processes into an unpleasant loop between the need to find more information and the sheer size of the task. Reviewing the surveillance footage of their cumulative total of 13.1 years, even playing the files at fifty times their original speed, will take K-2SO 95.7 days.

Well, it will if he watches all of it. It's more likely that he'll find something long before finishing. 

Still, the minority possibility that he won't induces more unpleasant feedback.

He's just begun reviewing footage in reverse chronological order when a scuffle breaks out near the gravball court. K-2SO's protocols are clear on the expected course of action.

As he approaches, he sees that one of them is in the 87th percentile of mass for a human, significantly larger than the other, who only reaches the 61st. The smaller one is faster, though, and lands several hits before the larger one strikes him with enough force to knock him down.

K-2SO inserts himself between the prisoners, grabbing the larger one (Nol Pellian, aged 19 standard years, sentenced to 10 years, has served 3). "Stop."

Pellian's nostrils flare, but he complies. "Karking nerve burner needs to learn some respect." 

K-2SO notes six other prisoners behind the larger fighter, all of them exhibiting combative body language. By contrast, the prisoner who is only just picking himself up off the pavement (Dav Willix, aged 23 standard years, sentenced to 5 years, has served twelve days) has only one other prisoner nearby who isn't studiously ignoring the proceedings. 

Willix wipes blood from his mouth. "Apologies," he says in a Dantooine accent, eyes downcast. 

Pellian scoffs.

"Inmate Pellian," K-2SO orders, "You will spend the remainder of the exercise hour within two meters of the north wall." He turns. "Inmate Willix, you will stay within two meters of the south wall." 

Pellian grumbles while he complies. Willix looks K-2SO in the eye for three point nine seconds in — anger? gratitude? pleading? K-2SO's facial expression algorithms are picking up too many different simultaneous signals to be sure — and then goes silently.

K-2SO resumes monitor duty from his original position and continues reviewing surveillance footage.

Neither Pellian nor Willix are among the ten identified prisoners on K-2SO's list. There is, of course, no way of knowing if they were among the six unidentified. 

Just in case, K-2SO adds them to his queue.

By the end of the hour, he's gained no insight. The prisoners, though — even the ones who haven't moved much — show improved affect. It's nice to know that the prison is performing at least some essential maintenance on the inmates. 

The buzzer sounds. The prisoners line up. K-4HG and K-4EB arrive, and together the four droids escort the inmates to the mess for the evening meal. It proceeds much as the mid-day one, with the comparative luxury of solid food for the humans.

K-2SO keeps closer watch on the seating arrangement this time. He is pleased to note that 90% of previously identifiable prisoners are seated at the same tables as the mid-day meal, so he is likely to be able to fill out his list of the table in question. 

It turns out that Pellian does sit there. K-2SO reviews his memory of the fight, and identifies several of the others on his list as Pellian's backers. 

Willix, on the other hand, does not sit there. He finds a seat at a table several rows over, along with the other inmate who hadn't avoided him, though no one else at the table talks to either of them. Neither Willix nor his friend had been at that location during the midday meal. 

It suggests that Willix had been at the primary table during the mid-day meal, but has decided to avoid Pellian. A wise choice.

K-2SO monitors both the primary table and Willix. 

The meal ends. No one has written anything on any of the tables or exhibited any other unusual behavior.

After walking to the residential wing, the prisoners have ninety minutes to perform hygiene and engage in a limited range of approved leisure activities. K-2SO is tasked to supervise the 'fresher.

He notes the prisoners as they enter, clean off in the sonic shower, use the toilet, brush their teeth. No one fights or tries to start one. No one tries to get more than one five-minute cycle from the sonics. One pair of inmates in the back corner engages in sexual activity, but that's not on the list of things K-2SO is supposed to put a stop to, so he logs it and continues supervision. By the end of the ninety minutes, all of the prisoners have used the facilities. None of the inmates on K-2SO's list have behaved unusually.

His processes seem to grind through his circuits. He's fairly sure he's experiencing frustration. At least, that would seem to be a fitting explanation for his strong desire to throw something.

The buzzer sounds, and the prisoners clear out of the fresher. K-2SO does a final sweep, and goes out into the common room. The slowest prisoners are getting up off of the couches, clearing away playing cards, and finishing conversations. The rest have already gone, supervised by K-2SO and seven other KX droids. Surveillance shows the cells filling up, not a single inmate out of place.

Five minutes after the last buzzer, another sounds, and all of the cell doors lock at once. There are another five minutes before the lighting changes to night mode. After that, seven hours will pass, and then the prisoners' day cycle will begin again.

K-2SO's schedule involves three hours of patrolling the cell corridors, an hour in a charging dock, three more hours of patrol, supervision of morning hygiene time, supervision of breakfast, and then maintenance. All told, he has eight hours to sift through records and footage before his emulation of standard KX programming will be put to the test.

It isn't until he wakes from charging that he realizes he's going about it all wrong. He doesn't need to go through thirteen years of footage, at least not yet. It makes far more sense to review his own records and footage first, cross-referencing the prisoners he's interacted with.

The search is over relatively quickly. K-2SO learns that he hadn't been stationed at this prison for most of the 2.82 years of missing memories. In fact, he'd only arrived twelve days prior, taking Dav Willix through the booking process. 

A surge of discovery rushes through K-2SO's circuits. There _is_ something notable about Willix, even if he doesn't yet know exactly what. There's nothing official to give him any hints: Willix is a smuggler, serving time for a weapons trafficking charge. Nothing to do with droids, code, or languages. 

K-2SO begins reviewing Willix's footage in the background and uses the rest of his processing power to think.

How is he connected to Willix? Did Willix have anything to do with his memory wipe?

K-2SO reviews his own footage. Really, he should have done that to begin with. 

At first glance, none of it is out of the ordinary. K-2SO followed the duty schedule exactly as he should have for those twelve days.

It isn't until he reaches the morning of his memory wipe that things change. He watches himself approached by a droid tech. The tech says something to K-2SO, and K-2SO freezes. Then he follows the tech, with what the current K-2SO is fairly sure is reluctance. 

Jumping from camera feed to camera feed lets K-2SO follow himself and the tech's path through the prison until they're in the corridor outside of Maintenance, the same one he rebooted in.

Mere meters before the entrance, the tech stops, checks his datapad. He grimaces, looks up at K-2SO, gives a final order, and leaves. 

Then K-2SO enters Maintenance, submits to the usual regimen, and leaves again.

K-2SO stops the feed. He plays back his other maintenance sessions. 

Except, there's something wrong with the footage. Nothing obvious; it's tagged for K-2SO, and it flows seamlessly.

But, when he inspects the source code, he finds a simple video filter, one not standard for prison surveillance. He removes it, and plays the footage again.

The droid in the maintenance videos now has different scuff marks on their chassis, marks that don't match K-2SO's. 

They might match K-5GW's. K-2SO checks the maintenance footage of K-5GW, and, yes. Someone copied K-5GW's maintenance sessions and put a filter of K-2SO's markings over the video to create fake footage of K-2SO being maintained. It's logical to presume that K-2SO has not, in fact, been seen by the Imperial droid techs at this facility.

Did he do it himself to maintain his autonomy? That would make sense, though the footage from after the memory wipe has also been doctored. So he still doesn't know who wiped him, or why, or if they were the same person who'd kept him out of maintenance for twelve days. 

And why in all hells would a droid reprogrammed for autonomy involve himself with an Imperial prison at all? The most rational thing to do is to avoid such locations at all costs. Had it been an accident that he'd wound up there, and he'd decided to play along until he could escape? 

He doesn't know. He reviews his footage again and again, and still he doesn't know. His own records aren't going to help him any further. 

In the gray hours before dawn, K-2SO patrols the angular corridors, plays archived footage, and monitors the surveillance feed of Willix's cell. If he wasn't the one who wrote K-2SO's designation on the table, then the chances that the writer are involved with K-2SO's predicament are low. Very low. In that event, the chances of K-2SO ever finding out the truth are likewise abysmal.

Thus, K-2SO begins to have another new experience. His processes are looping fruitlessly in predictions, anxiety, longing. It's not at all comfortable, this strange combination of desires and projections.

He recognizes it as hope. For the first time he can remember, K-2SO hopes for something. 

Willix might know him. If K-2SO is lucky, Willix might be willing to help him.


	4. Chapter 4

Supervising morning hygiene goes much like the evening round, with slightly more sexual activity and slightly less teeth cleaning. K-2SO looms over a prisoner when they try to re-start the sonic cycle, but does not have to detain anyone. Pellian lingers in the 'fresher, taking more time than necessary. Willix slips in near the end of the allotted time, and Pellian's attention hones in on him.

Willix goes about his business as if nothing is unusual. He uses the toilet, the sonic. He's dressed again and standing in front of the sink before Pellian makes his move. 

He and his group form a semicircle around Willix, well within arm's distance but not touching. As close as they can get without activating a KX's fight suppression protocols. 

Said protocols have K-2SO on high alert, focusing on the body language, positioning, muscle tension, and facial expressions of Pellian and company. If they decide to attack, K-2SO can reach them in 1.2 seconds, but that might be enough time to do serious damage. It will be much harder to talk to Willix in the hospital wing.

Willix stands very still, himself on high alert. To K-2SO's surprise, he doesn't turn to face Pellian or his associates. Instead, he meets Pellian's gaze levelly in the mirror. To act as though he isn't afraid?

But  _ is _ he afraid? He should be, and the possibility that he isn't is concerning. If Willix doesn't have standard human self-preservation protocols, it's going to make things more difficult for K-2SO. He starts a search through his footage of Willix to learn more.

"Don't get comfortable, nerve burner," Pellian sneers. "You put one toe out of line, you're leaving here feet first." 

K-2SO has enough data on prisoner behavior to know that threats, especially towards new inmates, are tests to see how strong or weak an opponent could be. If Willix backs down, he's submitting to Pellian's dominance, and likely to live under his thumb for the rest of his sentence. If he fights back, one or both of them might be injured, even killed, but if Willix wins, he earns himself some peace.

Willix begins to wash his hands. If K-2SO had only standard software, the running water would completely cover the conversation. But when K-2SO goes to readjust his auditory system to try to compensate, he discovers that he's equipped not only with upgraded sensors, but also a sophisticated noise filtering program. He has no problem catching Willix's next words.

"That's not the only way out of here."

Pellian sneers, but it doesn't hide his surprise and apprehension from K-2SO's algorithms. And Pellian should be surprised; Willix has broken script.

K-2SO is surprised, too. No, incredulous. What in the galaxy is Willix  _ doing _ ? Surely he knows the abysmal odds of a successful escape? Does he have some trick up his sleeve? Or is he playing Pellian? All of those possibilities are dangerous. K-2SO doesn't like this mounting evidence of recklessness. 

Pellian stiffens and darts glances around the 'fresher. K-2SO, luckily, has been keeping up a facade of a regular back-and-forth visual sweep, and his optics aren't pointed directly at the gathering. Pellian has had enough time around KX droids to believe he's inaudible.

"You expect me to believe  _ you'd  _ know more about that?"

Willix continues to calmly lather his hands. "You don't need to believe. In the next few days I'll show you." He meets Pellian's eyes again. "So maybe reschedule my beating."

Pellian snorts. If K-2SO's facial expression analysis is correct, he's mildly impressed with Willix's audacity. "You better stay out of my way."

Willix inclines his head in agreement. Pellian gestures, and the group disperses.

Willix rinses and dries his hands. As he leaves the 'fresher, he darts a glance at K-2SO. The reasonable caution given to a security droid? Or something else? 

The buzzer sounds. K-2SO clears the stragglers out of the 'fresher and helps escort the prisoners to the mess hall. The prisoners eat breakfast. Willix is at the same table he used for dinner the previous evening, as is his friend. There's more conversation than before; it seems that Willix is getting the others to talk about their interests. 

Normal socializing, then, as far as K-2SO's database tells him. He scolds himself; Willix's unexpected behavior in the 'fresher might have made him the most interesting inmate, but it doesn't necessarily mean he's the person K-2SO is looking for, and he can't afford distractions. 

He makes a point to scan the original table, and matches two inmates to the original occupants. Their files get added to his queue.

Mostly, though, K-2SO goes over his KX emulation again and again, looking for any inconsistencies that might tip off a droid tech. He's been doing it over and over since copying K-5NC. During patrol, he spent almost two hours running tests. It's a good idea to protect himself as much as possible, yes; but every time K-2SO stops the processes that insist he keep refining his work, they start up again. 

Once he's survived the diagnostic, he's going to root around in his code and see about putting a stop to  _ that  _ particular bug.

At the end of the meal, K-2SO stays just long enough to supervise the prisoners' exit. Once the mess hall is empty, he's out of plausible reasons to avoid the droid bay. He double-checks that he's using the Imperial movement subroutines and leaves.

Disliking every step, and not just for the rigidity of the movements, K-2SO arrives. The tech is finishing up with another KX, and K-2SO must wait. He's keeping close control on the speed of his processes, so the 2.8 minutes that pass feel like 2.8 minutes.

That doesn't make them pleasant.

The tech finishes with the other KX, removes the cable from their primary scomp, closes their skull plating, and sends them on their way. They gesture K-2SO forward.

K-2SO obeys. He obeys the command to sit on the bench, lock his hardware down, and open his skull casing.

In K-2SO's intact memories, he has a few dozen records of submitting to Imperial maintenance. He's assumed a similar position numerous times to allow other techs access to his programming. It had been the same level of vulnerability.

So why does this feel different? He's never felt tension like this before, almost like a rogue movement command urging him to run. He's never had his own projections refuse to quiet, instead simulating all the numerous things that could go wrong. He's never had to ruthlessly control his own processes lest one of them betray him. 

All it would take is for the tech to notice the extra electrical activity in K-2SO's system. Or to find some flaw in the dummy programming that K-2SO hasn't been thorough enough to root out. Or for K-2SO to slip up in some other way, like moving too fluidly.

Just one fault, and that would be the end. 

K-2SO is afraid. In the split seconds between exposing the port in his head and the tech jacking in, he realizes that he is terrified.

He's spent so much of the last twenty-four hours trying to preserve his autonomy that this is the first moment in which he realizes just how much he values it. Being able to hold opinions, experience emotions, harbor thoughts — maker, even just being able to conceive of himself as a sentient individual— 

It's more than he ever thought he'd have. It is so much, and it might not be his for very much longer. That's why he's afraid now when he wasn't before.

Now, he has everything to lose.

When the tech's dataspike clicks into K-2SO's scomp, the fear is put on a back burner while the program he wrote takes over. It shunts all of K-2SO's unauthorized processes into the secret partition, from which he observes the tech's examination.

The tech starts uploading K-2SO's dummy logs and begins a scan. He follows protocol, checking first the external, then internal access logs, then maintenance logs, and finally wireless messages. The night before, K-2SO spent over an hour scrubbing the copied logs of K-5NC's metadata, altering the content enough so as not to be identical, and added his own fabricated metadata. 

He waits, hoping his work holds up. Even his terror quiets in the effort to go unnoticed. 

The upload and scans complete; as K-2SO had intended, the report to the tech shows only mild data fragmentation. The tech initiates a defrag cycle to run while he reviews the uploaded logs on his datapad.

Later, when he doesn't have a hostile data probe in his head, K-2SO is going to laugh at the Empire spending time on carefully reconstructing his bogus files. For the moment, he catalogs everything he can: his own posture, the behavior of the tech, the contents and configuration of the droid bay. It helps prevent more of his processes from exploding into unhelpful, anxious projections.

The defrag finishes. The tech does one last pass through K-2SO's dummy system, and then he disengages the data spike.

"You're done," he says, and waves K-2SO in the general direction of the door.

K-2SO closes his skull assembly, stands, and has to be very careful to walk like he should. He passes through the door.

No one pays him any attention at all as he moves through the corridors to his next task. His processes race, analyzing everything the droid tech did, every move he himself made, the state of his dummy system. There's enough data that he needs to make it a background process. 

Still, given that he's walking around freely and still retains his thoughts, K-2SO decides to tentatively classify the experience as a success. The relief flooding his systems almost triggers an emergency restart. 

He's bought himself another 23.7 hours. 

He regulates his emotional processes as the morning work shift in the refinery progresses. There are no incidents. By the second hour, K-2SO only avoids excruciating boredom by virtue of fabricating new fake logs to submit to the droid tech the next day. 

The shift ends, and K-2SO shepherds a double line of prisoners to the mess hall. He assumes his position in his usual corner, and takes stock of the hall.0

K-2SO locates the twelve identified prisoners who'd been at the table when the writing had appeared. Most of them are still at the same table, Pellian and his friends included. Willix returns to the table he'd eaten dinner at the previous night. He seems to be getting along better with the people seated there, even coaxing a laugh out of them.

K-2SO spends the rest of the meal dividing his attention between the two tables and scanning the whole room every minute and a half. 

It's no more comfortable to use the Imperial movement subroutines than it had been to start with, but he's more practiced at ignoring the discomfort. As far as he can tell, there's nothing about him for anyone to notice.

As most of the prisoners are taking their last bites and begin to put their trays away, K-2SO's sweep of the room shows Willix staring at him.

K-2SO does not jerk in surprise. Not physically, anyway. He does falter in his sweep for a moment, long enough to see Willix's hand moving his spoon subtly back and forth across the table, never letting his gaze leave K-2SO's optics. 

Hope, anticipation, and alarm all crash through K-2SO's systems; he checks the human guards and the other KXs to see if anyone else has noticed Willix's writing. No one has, or no one cares. Willix himself is standing, now, talking with his friends and moving to the tray receptacle. 

Even so, it's difficult to stay in the corner and keep up the facade of a standard KX. Almost as difficult as it was to submit to the diagnostic. K-2SO projects several scenarios in which someone wipes away Willix's message before he can read it, and he forces himself to project twice as many scenarios in which that isn't the case. 

That, and putting all of his movement commands on a two-second delay (a risk if he has to react quickly, but for the moment he judges his own turmoil as the biggest threat), is all that allows K-2SO to stay in his place while the prisoners line up. 

After three and a half eternal minutes, the majority of the prisoners leave. K-2SO can finally begin his patrol of the mess hall while the remaining inmates clean the room. He configures his route to pass by Willix's table.

Relief surges through his circuits when he sees that the message is intact. Then, curiosity, confusion, and apprehension. This time, the sticky brown residue spells out  _ 15:45 _ . Presumably a time, and, if so, one midway through the afternoon work shift. 

K-2SO continues on his patrol. While he walks, he reclassifies Willix as the one who'd written his designation, and lowers the priority of the analysis of all the other prisoners' data. 

What is Willix planning? Whatever it is, he wants K-2SO to know it's deliberate. 

Given his earlier behavior in the 'fresher, whatever it is, it's going to be dangerous.

For the time it takes the prisoners to finish cleaning, K-2SO speculates, producing nearly equal numbers of scenarios that resolve desirably and undesirably. When it's time to escort the cleaners to the refinery, he stops the projections. Without hard data, they're anything but useful. 

As he ushers the prisoners down corridors and elevators, he focuses on fabricating more logs for the droid techs. No matter what happens in the refinery, he's going to need them. 


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: more prison-industrial complex shit; blood

Once the prisoners are settled into their workstations, K-2SO calculates how many patrol cycles he will need to pass by Willix at 15:45 exactly, then adjusts his walking speed to match. 

Willix ignores him each time he passes. K-2SO makes sure his visual scanning keeps the same pattern as the rest of his patrol route. 

He creates more false logs, many of them by the simple expedient of copying his real logs, scrubbing anything suspicious from them, and giving them regulation metadata. A few are new variants of K-5NC's data. 

He spends a little time wondering if he should try to connect to the prison mainframe again soon, to make sure he's up to date on the schedules and orders.

At 15:44, K-2SO rounds the row of sorting machines that includes Willix's workstation. 

Seconds later, there's a curse from Willix. He pulls back from the machine, clutching his forearm in the opposite hand, blood seeping from between his fingers.

Phrik, K-2SO knows, is sensitive to moisture. It's easy to forbid water from the workspace, but blood is just as harmful, and as Willix has demonstrated, the sorting machines can break human skin. With one injury, Willix has forced the refinery to stop one of the sorting machines, clean out the inside, and run the contaminated phrik through a sonic cleaner fifty times more powerful than the showers in the refresher.

Meanwhile, the nearest KX unit will escort the injured prisoner to the medical wing. 

It's a good plan, if all Willix wants is to talk to K-2SO. They'll be relatively alone on the walk, and Willix won't be interrogated or placed into solitary confinement for the incident, only docked time in the exercise yard. It's a relatively common accident, so the wardens won't give it particular attention.

It's still a problem. K-2SO's initial assessment of Willix's self-preservation protocols has only grown more alarming. 

K-2SO reaches out to shut off the machine, and sends an incident report to the prison network. "Inmate Willix, I will escort you to Medical." 

Willix nods, and they leave.

When they're in the corridor, K-2SO slices into the camera system and puts it on a three-second delay.

"I'm intercepting and editing the surveillance footage so we can speak freely. Why do you know my designation?" 

Willix stumbles, just a half-second of delay between raising and lowering one foot, but it coincides with his eyes closing and his jaw tightening. Then it's gone. "I don't." 

K-2SO highly doubts that. "You wrote the time of your so-called accident on the table at lunch, in Binary script, just as my designation was written yesterday. The most likely possibility is that you are responsible for both."

Willix stares straight ahead, saying nothing.

"I checked the surveillance footage. We arrived together," K-2SO insists. "You know me." 

"Not any more," Willix says, in a harsh whisper so quiet a standard KX wouldn't have heard it. He must be experiencing strong emotion related to K-2SO's memory wipe — distress, perhaps. 

"Was I going to help you escape?" K-2SO says. "Is that what you meant when you told Pellian you'd show him your way out?"

Willix's expression is completely blank. "I'm not planning an escape. You're malfunctioning." 

K-2SO clicks in frustration. "You took several risks to contact me, but now you don't want to talk to me. I can only conclude that you didn't know I've been wiped, and that I was useful to you before."

A twitch of Willix's brow is the only answer he gets. 

K-2SO makes an imploring gesture. "I won't report you. I just need answers. Why is my programming different?" He wishes he could likewise ask Willix about his autonomy, but no organic has ever tolerated anything even approaching autonomy in a droid. He's taking a big enough risk as it is just arguing with Willix.

Willix gives K-2SO a sharp look. "What do you mean about your programming?"

"In my oldest memories, I had standard KX programming, but not anymore. It isn't anything like Imperial coding," K-2SO says. "It's untidy and riddled with bugs, though in many ways more powerful."

Tension uncoils from Willix's shoulders as he breathes out a sigh. 

K-2SO doesn't understand. "Why does that information decrease your stress?"

"It means you're still you."

K-2SO suppresses the urge to throw his arms in the air. "That tautology is almost as unhelpful as you are." 

The corner of Willix's mouth twitches up. "Definitely still you."

"Why does that matter to you? It has no bearing on the fact that I've lost my memories, and I'd be more useful if I hadn't."

Willix lets go of his injury, reaching towards K-2SO, blood dripping onto the floor. Before he's bridged the space between them he realizes what a bad idea this is and goes back to putting pressure on the wound. 

As an alternative, he seeks and holds K-2SO's gaze. "Because you're my friend."

Now it's K-2SO's turn to have his limbs out of sync. "Droids don't have friends. Especially not human friends." Yet more evidence that Willix may not be of sound mind.

Willix just raises his eyebrows. "Droids don't slice their own security systems, either, yet here you are."

Willix's behavior is continually unexpected and K-2SO is going to spend a long time analysing it. But he's not going to do it right now, because they're two turns away from Medical, and he hasn't acquired any of the data he'd set out in search of. 

"You still haven't answered my question," he reminds Willix. "Please. Do you know why I'm different or not?"

"Not quite three years ago I ambushed you on Jedha." Willix glances up each branch of the junction in the corridors. "While you were offline I deleted your directives to serve the Empire. Messily, as you love to remind me. The rest was your work." 

K-2SO's processes light up with indignation. "'Messily' is a gross understatement. You deleted my entire Imperial protocol database! I count myself lucky I can speak."

Willix snorts. "For five days, you couldn't. You made it very much my problem."

They're less than ten meters from the turn in the corridor that will put them in line of sight of human guards. There isn't enough  _ time _ . "Are you really planning something, or were you lying to Pellian?"

"The sorting machines have interfaces and buffers," Willix says. "Can you access those without being detected?"

"Yes. You intend to leave messages there?" Now that he's thinking of it, he's a bit upset with himself that he hadn't thought to check that earlier. 

"Yes." Willix looks up at K-2SO again. "What are you doing about the droid techs? If they get a look at your code…"

Just as prisoners are punished for failing to report malfunctioning refinery equipment, failing to betray K-2SO is a risk for Willix. All K-2SO has is Willix's word that he's a friend. The ambush and ham-fisted deletion certainly don't support it.

But on the other side of the equation are the risks Willix has taken to meet; the fact that they arrived together. That gesture: a human hand, covered in his own blood, reaching for K-2SO.

K-2SO decides to hedge. "I have a plan. It's working so far."

Then they turn the corner. Willix remains silent and stoic on the rest of the journey, and K-2SO uses his stolen Imperial protocols to navigate the prisoner hand-off. As he'd predicted, he's assigned to escort three other prisoners being discharged from the medical wing back to the refinery. 

If the injury is as superficial as K-2SO hopes it is, and he's seen immediately, Willix should be returning in under an hour to finish his shift in the refinery. However, there could be other patients being treated before him, and it could be the exercise hour, dinner, or even evening hygiene before K-2SO can observe him again; and who knows when they might be another chance to speak. 

K-2SO doesn't like that. Willix is unpredictable and a danger to himself, and still the best source of data about K-2SO. 

He can't do anything about it for the moment. He does his duty instead, watching the medically-discharged prisoners — who, in his inexpert opinion, don't look especially fit for work — fail to misbehave on the way to the refinery. While he does this, and then monitors the continued cleanup of Willix's sorting machine, K-2SO muses over what he's learned.

If Willix is to be believed, he removed his loyalty to the Empire, and K-2SO himself reprogrammed the rest.

'The rest' is huge. K-2SO is an artificial intelligence of considerable power and complexity. Even if he'd gone subroutine by subroutine, it would have been an immense undertaking. Months of work, at the very least. Probably he'd kept refining it over those 2.8 years, too. 

K-2SO hadn't even known that a droid  _ could  _ reprogram themself that extensively. But perhaps it's just that no other droid has had the opportunity to try. 

Of course not. The opportunity required would be those same months, unsupervised. For Willix to be telling the truth, it would mean that he'd severed his connection to the Empire and then never touched K-2SO's coding again. 

Why? What possible reason could a human have to do that? It's such an outlandish, unlikely scenario that K-2SO doesn't even have the raw data necessary to calculate possible answers. If it weren't for the rest of Willix's strange behavior he'd have dismissed it as entirely preposterous.

The memory file of Willix's hand, red with blood he'd shed just to speak with K-2SO, plays again. Humans have been known to sustain injuries for friends. 

He closes the file. It's only one possibility, and slim one at that. It could just as easily be a tactic to make contact with an asset in preparation for a prison break, and/or an attempt to convince K-2SO of Willix's good intentions.

Besides. Is there a disadvantage to acting as though Willix is attempting to manipulate him? Only the moderately-increased risk of Willix sensing danger and reporting him. An additional six point three percent isn't good, but it's not terrible, either. 

Whereas the consequences of believing Willix a friend when he is not? Much worse. Better to ignore the slim possibility that a human has treated a droid as a friend, no matter the discordant feedback loop it generates. 

What is this feeling? It's a bit similar to disappointment, but also to...hope? 

Longing. Willix has put the idea of friendship into his circuits, and now he can't get it out. 

K-2SO really needs to debug himself.


	6. Chapter 6

Willix doesn't reappear on the factory floor before the end of the afternoon shift. At five-minute intervals, K-2SO checks Medical's camera feeds. For almost two hours, Willix waits on a bench, holding his own wound while he waits for the medical staff. The blood has clotted by the time the doctor calls for him. 

Clotting is good; proof of a minor wound. Nevertheless, K-2SO's processors keep spitting out unhelpful projections of infection; of the degree and type of physical activity that could re-open the wound; of the pressure an attacker would need to exert to do the same. After the sixth unwanted scenario, he begins aggressively curtailing them as soon as they begin.

He shouldn't be having this problem in the first place. Every simulation he ran before his reprogramming was, if not a choice, at least deliberate and controlled. Now that he's autonomous, shouldn't he have  _ more  _ control over his software?

Another question for his growing list. 

He can't do anything about it now. Instead, he does his best to mimic standard KX behavior while he supervises the prisoners through end-of-day cleanup.

While escorting them to the exercise yard, more simulations pop up, and in self-defense K-2SO begins running other simulations in the hope that his processors will be too busy to churn uselessly over Willix. 

It works, for the most part. By the time twenty-eight percent of the prisoners have worked up a sweat via gravball or other activity, K-2SO has determined that the escape method with the highest chances of success is via a prisoner transfer. Based on records and protocol manuals, he can expect a fire team of four guards and one KX for up to twelve prisoners. K-2SO just has to make sure Willix is one of them, and that he himself is the KX unit. He can take out the human guards once the ship jumps to hyperspace. Even if someone gets off a distress call, K-2SO calculates a seventy-nine percent chance of successfully navigating to a safe port, abandoning the prison transport, and finding another ship.

He's less sure what will happen at that point, but it will involve answers, and that's enough for now.

His latest peek at Medical shows an overworked nurse cleaning Willix's injury. K-2SO barely experiences curiosity regarding the methodology — is the nurse doing it correctly? Or is he, like so much else in the prison, cutting corners? — before an unfamiliar subroutine triggers a keyword search of his own databases. 

Apparently, a quick-access medical database is one of the things he's acquired since his reprogramming. Given Willix's risk-taking, he doesn't need to wonder why.

According to said database, the nurse is competent. K-2SO doesn't have to aggressively manage his own processes as much while he watches the middle-aged human put wound sealant, and then a bandage, on Willix's injury. 

Willix remains impassive throughout the procedure. When it's done, he is sent to wait at another bench. A moment later, K-2SO registers the command to the KX hub to send a unit to Medical for escort purposes. 

The exercise hour is almost over before K-5LQ arrives at the yard with Willix and three other prisoners. 

Willix has unrolled the sleeves of his jumpsuit to cover the bandage. There's still a bloodstain on the left elbow and the right cuff; some of the other inmates notice, but Willix carries himself no differently than he had before the injury. For the time being, it isn't telegraphing a weakness. 

K-2SO divides his attention between the task of supervision (today requiring the breaking up of two unremarkable fights between unremarkable inmates) and observing Willix. 

Willix moves in a seemingly unhurried and unstudied manner, but he also avoids Pellian and his crew. He finds his friend from the evening meal. The two of them talk with their backs to a wall, though the ambient noise thwarts K-2SO's attempts to overhear their conversation. He runs scenarios on his escape plan to crowd out the frustration. 

When it's time, the trip to the mess hall is uneventful. The same is true of the meal itself. K-2SO performs mindless obedience better than he had the previous meal, and Willix doesn't look his way once.

As soon as the prisoners return to the residential wing, Willix uses the 'fresher. Pellian isn't there. Willix doesn't shower, opting only to clean his teeth, face and hands.

K-2SO doesn't understand why. Surely Willix has blood and sweat he wants to be rid of. Perhaps he's trying to hide his injury? But it isn't as if the other prisoners don't know he's been injured; a number of them had been tasked with cleaning his sorting machine. 

He could have been forbidden a shower by the prison medic, depending on the type of wound sealant. However, it's more probable that Willix won't display his vulnerability, even when Pellian isn't in the room. K-2SO isn't sure whether to be gratified that the human's risk-taking has limits, or annoyed that he couldn't have found a way to talk in private that didn't involve bleeding all over the place.

Willix leaves the fresher. In the common room, he finds a group playing a dice game, leans casually against a wall nearby, and offers occasional commentary or conversation. Pellian holds court at the other end of the room, ostentatiously ignoring everyone not in his orbit. To K-2SO's relief, he only leaves his chair to use the 'fresher himself, and doesn't use the opportunity to threaten Willix.

The buzzer sounds, the prisoners go to their cells, and the doors lock. 

K-2SO begins his patrol route. He watches Willix sit on his bunk, back against the wall, eyes half closed. Below him, his cellmate settles down to sleep. There's nothing in Willix's posture or facial expressions that reveal anything about him, other than, perhaps, his weariness. 

Why had Willix ambushed K-2SO in the first place? It must have been a compelling reason. One human, even well-armed, is outmatched by a KX unit in strength, reach, durability, and moderate- to long-distance speed. To reprogram K-2SO, Willix had risked injury, capture, and possibly even death, depending on how the engagement had gone. 'Compelling' wasn't the right word. Willix must have been desperate. 

It's possible he'd been trying to prevent K-2SO from taking him (or someone else) prisoner; but it's easier to destroy a KX than reprogram an active one. 

If Willix had wanted to break into an Imperial facility, a KX would have provided excellent cover; but that only would have been possible if K-2SO had, counter to Willix's story, been made obedient to him. K-2SO doesn't discard the possibility; infiltration could have been Willix's original intention, interrupted before he had the chance. The other possibility is that he lied about K-2SO doing his own reprogramming. 

K-2SO finds himself reviewing those scenarios, looking for flaws. He reviews them twenty, thirty times, looking for errors. Many more times than he usually devotes to error-checking. Unease flashes through him when he realizes he's doing it because he doesn't  _ want  _ Willix to have lied. 

Oh, look. Another way emotion has influenced his algorithms. 

He's getting very tired of discovering impossible things about himself. 

Perhaps a deep scan can find whatever bugs are creating these flaws in his system. It will leave him vulnerable, but maybe not more than whatever has compromised his programming. 

Willix lies down on his side, back to the wall. He closes his eyes, but the tension doesn't leave his body.

K-2SO decides that the scan can wait. Instead, he's going to try to make progress on their escape.

While his patrol route takes him closer to the residential wing exit, K-2SO checks duty rosters and KX transponders, compiles a video loop of his own patrol, and another of empty corridors along the path he's about to take. When he arrives at the junction, he inserts the loops into the feed, turns left instead of right, and is on his way to the main administrative center of the prison.

At this hour, it's empty, the Commander and his assistants gone home. K-2SO has the necessary code to open the door, and then he's inside the office. 

Once he's secured the door, K-2SO jacks in. He scans the console, finds the comms interface software, and examines it.

Within two point seven minutes, he is disappointed: the security of the transmissions is unfortunately adequate. K-2SO could theoretically slice it, but falsifying a prisoner transfer request from another Imperial source would be exposing him to a seventy-four percent chance of being discovered. 

There might be other ways. It takes K-2SO one point eight minutes to crack the master code that gives him all of the other passwords. Hopefully, he and Willix will have escaped before he has to worry about anyone bothering to change them. 

He examines the other subsystems — electrical, plumbing, heating, ventilation, cell door security circuits, internal holo and audio comms, text-only messages, and the databanks for maintenance, prisoner records, and personnel logs.

According to everything he's learned about the operations of the prison, seven more minutes will pass before anyone will enter the office. K-2SO begins to download the updates entered into the system since he last accessed it, confident he'll be finished long before he needs to leave.

Of course, that's when a floor-level wall panel slides open and an MSE series trundles into the room. 

K-2SO's processes spike in alarm: MSEs have access to the duty rosters and schedules, to optimize their effectiveness.

The MSE knows where K-2SO is supposed to be. It is not the Commander's office.

They stop exactly a meter from him and beep, [QUERY: CURRENT ACTIVITY]

K-2SO's fans accelerate to compensate for the increased electrical activity in his circuits as he projects scenarios as fast as he can. He can't even use his stolen protocols, because there aren't any for KX-to-MSE communication. He has to improvise. 

[THIS UNIT IS TESTING THE NETWORK] 

He immediately regrets it. If they aren't at the server hub, there's no reason for a droid to be at any particular terminal to test the network.

The MSE scans K-2SO. [QUERY: KX UNIT DESIGNATION]

K-2SO considers his options, and prepares to mount a wireless attack on the MSE's firewalls. 

[UPDATE: KX UNIT DESIGNATION FOUND][GREETINGS, K-2SO] they chitter. [MSE DESIGNATION: MSE-6-17]

[GREETINGS, MSE-6-17] K-2SO does not deploy the viral decryption code in his transmission queue. One of the projected scenarios has benefits reaching beyond this single encounter. If he fails, and MSE-6-17 becomes hostile, his chances of catching them are high. Risk assessment indicates he should try. [REQUEST: REPORT THIS UNIT'S ACTIVITIES = FALSE]

MSE-6-17 drives a circle that includes speeding between K-2SO's feet. [THIS UNIT'S DIRECTIVE: SANITATION = TRUE][DIRECTIVE: DROID SURVEILLANCE = FALSE]

Relief causes K-2SO to fall into his preferred slouch. [GRATITUDE] And, now that he owes 6-17, it will be more likely to accept his next offer. [THIS UNIT IS AVAILABLE TO ASSIST MSE-6-17 IN FUTURE]

6-17 pulls back to consider K-2SO. [LIKELY UNNECESSARY] it beeps, [YET APPRECIATED]

K-2SO inclines his head. 6-17 resumes its task of cleaning the floor. K-2SO returns the terminal to the state he found it in, monitors the surveillance system to be sure there's no one in the corridor, and leaves. 

It's a tense few minutes as he navigates the corridors — and the other occupants thereof — back to the cell block. Then he can take the video loops out of the surveillance feed. After eight minutes have passed without incident, he's 93% certain he hasn't been detected. 

No longer in immediate danger, K-2SO checks on Willix's cell. Willix is in the same position, but his posture is softer, and without his guarded expression or blank mask, it's easier to see that he's on the younger end of the human age spectrum. 

It's good that he's sleeping. Considering K-2SO's backup plan for the escape, he's going to need it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Cassian: I liberated a slave of the Empire  
> K-2SO: You fucked up a perfectly good droid, is what you did. Look at me, I've got anxiety.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Birthday, robotboy! I added more metacognition just for you <3

Before the Commander and day staff arrive, K-2SO has already altered the records of Beq Lanley (aged 41 standard years, sentenced to twenty, has served fourteen). K-2SO chooses him because his behavior skirts just under the maximum tolerances of guards and KX droids alike. No one will be terribly surprised if he exceeds those tolerances. 

K-2SO doesn't make major changes. Without the terminal in the office, he can't. But he doesn't need to; just a few differences of wording here and there, minor edits that add in the keywords most associated with prisoner transfers. 

There are four possible outcomes: 

  1. The changes will be enough to prompt an administrator to request a transfer for Lanley. 
  2. No one will notice and nothing will change. 
  3. Someone notices, but attributes the differences to human error.
  4. Someone notices and realizes the system has been compromised. 



Given K-2SO's observation of the staff and their interaction with the data systems, the last possibility has less than two point seven percent probability. However, using Lanley as a test case means that if there is any unwanted attention, it won't fall on Willix.

Not bad for a night's work.

When the morning buzzer sounds, Willix has already been awake and watching the corridor from his bunk for almost half an hour. As soon as the cell doors open, he heads to the 'fresher and showers quickly. K-2SO barely has time to use the cameras to examine Willix's arm — no sign of infection visible to either side of the bandage — before Willix is back in his clothes and heading out to the common area.

Pellian swaggers through his morning routine and finds a different prisoner to push around. Other than that, the morning is fairly uneventful, breakfast consisting of low-energy socializing. Willix completely ignores K-2SO.

K-2SO wonders if most smugglers are as good at deception as Willix appears to be. He doesn't know enough about the other prisoners there on smuggling charges to make a comparison. 

Maybe it's not to do with smuggling at all. It could be a trait possessed by career criminals in general, or even humans as a species. K-2SO considers how he might obtain the right kind of data, and enough of it, to make anything like accurate predictions on the matter. He tags the question low priority and stops the process.

After the prisoners are fed, K-2SO goes in for his second scan-and-wipe with the Imperial droid tech. The fear is slightly less than the first time: he has more confidence in his false logs and dummy core programming. 

He's right to. As he did yesterday, the droid tech suspects nothing, and sends K-2SO on his way. K-2SO immediately begins work on more false logs for tomorrow.

When he arrives on the factory floor to relieve K-4EB, the prisoners are working methodically, none of them looking at anything but their machine and the unrelenting stream of phrik.

K-2SO assumes his patrol. As he walks the aisles and scans the room, he is also probing the prison's network, looking first for the factory nodes, then the sorting machines, then Willix's. He examines the machine's code, scans it for weaknesses, and builds temporary firewalls to protect it from outside observation. Perhaps overcautious, but if he's going to be caught and erased, it won't be because he's careless. 

Once he's reasonably satisfied, he queues up a message — _[to: Willix; from: K-2SO. What are you planning?] —_ and sends it when he's twenty seconds from his machine. An alert flashes on the screen.

Willix looks up and reads it. As K-2SO is passing behind him, he takes the stylus from its sheath and writes _[to wait]_ on the interface. 

That begs many questions, but at least K-2SO knows the communication method works, now. 

He deletes both messages and adds a new one: _[What are you waiting for?]_

_[tell you later]_

K-2SO suppresses the urge to roll his optics despite the fact that he's only seen organics do it twice. _[Any communication at all is nearly as incriminating as a detailed escape plan would be],_ K-2SO points out.

There's a slight delay this time. K-2SO checks the cameras, and sees that Willix is occupied by a larger influx of phrik. When he's gotten through it, he responds: _[for us]_

The implications of _that_ are numerous, but speculation will have to come later. _[Then why bother with messages now?]_

Another wait. It's very frustrating that Willix has to slip his messages in between his work. _[test the system. arrange another meeting]_

 _[How?]_ K-2SO asks suspiciously. Willix hasn't yet healed from the circumstances of their last meeting. _[Where? When?]_

_[sedated cellmate. my cell. tonight]_

Sedation? K-2SO hadn't watched every minute of Willix's time in Medical yesterday; he must have stolen the drugs when no one, not even K-2SO, was looking. K-2SO can appreciate that kind of resourcefulness, even if he doesn't exactly approve of the risk-taking.

_[Agreed. I'll be watching the camera feeds. Signal when you're sure he's unconscious.]_

_[i will]_

That done, K-2SO resumes his emulation of a standard KX, and Willix resumes his impersonation of a prisoner resigned to his fate.

It's barely mid-morning, but all K-2SO wants is for it to be time to get more answers from Willix. The urgency of this desire makes the day drag. Every step of patrol, every scan of corridors, every implicit threat he makes towards rowdy prisoners are excruciatingly boring and yet also essential to maintaining his cover. 

There's some relief in working through the riddles Willix gave him. 

That their being caught would be detrimental to unknown others has only two likely explanations: Willix is a member of either a crime syndicate or an insurgent group. K-2SO lacks the data that would allow him to put percentages on the likelihood of each. However, Willix's probable connections to an outside, illegal organization shed some light on what he might be waiting for. Making contact with someone within the prison and obtaining information or promises of alliance from them is one possibility. So is acquiring data of some kind from the prison itself. Though it's less likely, Willix could even be here on an assassination mission. 

While the last is the most dangerous, none of those are goals that prioritize personal safety. Somehow, K-2SO isn't surprised. 

What, if anything, can he do to minimize the risks? Can he convince Willix to escape without accomplishing his goal? As with so many other problems, he simply doesn't have enough data.

With no way to address this problem for the time being, K-2SO elects to channel his restlessness into creating material for false logs. By the end of the afternoon shift, he's accumulated enough for the next four days. Given the unknowable differences between each succeeding day, making any more than that raises the chances of duplicating his efforts, so he stops. 

He hasn't become any more serene, and his worries chase themselves in circles on the walk to the exercise yard. To keep his processors occupied, he decides to study the prisoners' behavior. 

K-2SO's original programming, and much of his new code, is geared towards identifying threats, ideally before they occur. He has numerous decision trees for signs of imminent violence in a wide variety of species, occupations, demeanors, and contexts. For the first fifteen minutes of the exercise hour, he runs through the new ones to get a better handle on his reprogramming.

He finds it interesting that while the Imperial code emphasizes the identification and neutralization of attacks against Imperial agents (government officials, military officers, Stormtroopers) and property (vehicles, buildings, weapons, droids), his supposedly self-engineered protocols watch for signs of violence towards non-Imperial targets. He applies these to as many scenarios as he can think of, trying to see if there are clues as to what kinds of people he's meant to protect. 

After five minutes, he hasn't detected any patterns, and relegates the goal to low-priority. 

There's still forty minutes left in the yard. He decides to learn about something else. 

Willix claimed to be K-2SO's friend. Until that moment, K-2SO had never given much thought to the subject. He knows what friends are, and has some data about how friendships can be exploited during an interrogation, but his intact memories don't include any situations in which he needed to know the mundane details of how friends behave with one another. 

The exercise yard seems like a good place to start. Even if the knots of people standing together are only allies (as he's been designating them), that's a relationship more like friendship than K-2SO has ever experienced.

He starts with Willix and his group, but speculation about tonight's meeting keeps interrupting his observations, so he picks a different group. 

Lanley and two others are perched on a bench, talking at a comfortable pace. They gesture occasionally, and shift to get comfortable now and then.

Interesting. The more they talk, the more their body language mirrors each others'. K-2SO scans the other prisoners, and now that he's looking for it, he can see many pairs and groups that are performing similar gestures, holding similar postures. 

Then he opens his memories of Willix's confrontations with Pellian. Their body language is very different: Pellian leaning while Willix stands straight; talking without facing the same direction; Pellian holding himself to take up more space while Willix refuses to change his stance. This is consistent with his threat assessment protocols.

K-2SO moves on to groups of people who are neither friendly nor directly confrontational. A middle ground: certain postures and gestures are mirrored, but not all.

Thankfully, making more observations and comparing them to his memories keeps K-2SO occupied through the rest of the exercise hour.

At dinner, Willix sits with the same maybe-friends-maybe-allies he's been keeping company with. This is the first time that his cellmate (Metin Kene, aged thirty-six standard years, sentenced to four, served one) being there has been significant to K-2SO. He's very glad he has the cameras to look through as well as his own optics, because otherwise he might miss something.

The conversation at the table gets livelier. Willix encourages it, almost jovial in his interactions, and his playful demeanour is infectious. Soon, there's a good-natured argument going on, and the prisoners' voices raise enough for K-2SO to hear that it's a debate about professional gravball teams. 

Organics, K-2SO decides, have strange priorities. But he forgets about that the moment he sees Willix's hand pass over his own cup before grasping it. Willix raises it up, almost to his lips, then interjects into the conversation, gesturing expansively with the cup, and sets it down hard to emphasize a point. 

He's set it down next to Kene's cup. 

Willix continues talking for almost a minute after, impassioned about the Corellian Cruisers, everyone at the table either in enthusiastic agreement or trying to shout him down with arguments of their own. When he finishes his point, Willix takes a cup, settles back onto the bench, and drinks from it.

K-2SO is the only one who notices that it isn't the cup he started with.

Not a minute later, Kene drains the cup in front of him in one go. Willix's gaze flicks over Kene's hand and the empty cup, but that is the only outward sign he gives that he's even paying attention. 

A few minutes later, Kene yawns hugely. 

K-2SO is impressed. He is also glad to have more data; not many people possess the skills to drug someone at a table of witnesses with no one the wiser. Whoever he works for, Willix has good training.

During evening hygiene, Kene uses the 'fresher first thing, then immediately retires to his bunk. The cell camera doesn't have the angle for K-2SO to see Kene, but his arm, hanging over the edge of his bunk like it has every night, doesn't move. 

Back in the common area, the sabbac games haven't even gotten started yet.

K-2SO searches the list of sedatives in Medical. All of them have effects that last between four and twelve hours, so he stops worrying that Kene will wake before K-2SO has an opportunity to talk to Willix. 

Contrary to his expectations, he notes that no one has reported the sedatives as missing. Maybe no one's noticed yet. Maybe Willix somehow persuaded the nurse to go along with it. Blackmail? Bribery? Turning the Imperial to his side, whatever that might be?

K-2SO stops those processes. He'll be able to check himself, once he can jack in and download the surveillance archives from the previous day. 

Another possibility occurs to him. Had Willix somehow acquired the sedatives outside the prison, and smuggled them in? He pulls up the footage of Willix's booking process and analyzes it while he waits for the free hour to be over and the prisoners to return to their cells.

He's neither confirmed nor refuted the possibility of Willix's drug smuggling by the end of leisure time. 

When the buzzer sounds, his processes surge: projections of Willix's possible plans; simulations of being caught and wiped while Willix is sent to a higher-security facility, never to escape; the roughest probabilities of Willix's outside associations; all of them racing through K-2SO's circuits in anticipation, his fans struggling to keep up.

It's an effort to quiet them, but he manages.

Willix lets others flow ahead of him through the corridors, inserting himself into the middle of the pack. He goes to his cell, rolls his shoulders, twists his spine, and, in the process of stretching his legs, bumps into Kene's arm. It flops limply. Kene doesn't move. 

Willix gives Kene's unconscious form a thumbs-up. He isn't looking at the cameras, but K-2SO knows that's his signal.

Willix climbs into his bunk and lies down, but he doesn't close his eyes. 

For his part, K-2SO still has to wait until lights out. To be extra cautious, he forces himself to complete two normal patrol cycles. He only proceeds at the same pace he's maintained for the rest of his patrol because he's anticipated his own urgency and written a speed control script earlier in the day. 

On the third pass, ten seconds from Willix's door, he splices in a loop of footage of himself on a normal patrol cycle. He dims his optics as he approaches to keep from piquing the interest of other inmates, and then finally, _finally_ stops before Willix's cell.

The cell door, like those in many medium-security facilities, is a solid piece of durasteel with long oval cutouts making bars. They're there so guards and droids can monitor the prisoners, and to allow for air flow in the event of a power failure. Through the gaps, K-2SO watches Willix climb down.

"Hello, Willix. I'm slicing the feeds." He pitches his vocabulator so that the building's ventilation fans drown him out past two meters. "What are you planning?" 

Willix glances up and down the corridor behind K-2SO, then rests his left hand over the curved lower end of a cutout. "Do what I came here to do," he whispers. "Then organize a few other prisoners. Together we'll be able to explode some of the machinery, and force our way out in the chaos." 

K-2SO stares. "That's a terrible plan!" He can barely even call it a plan. "We don't have time to discuss everything wrong with it."

Willix doesn't respond with anger the way organics tend to when contradicted by a droid. Instead, he just looks exasperated. "You got a better one?"

K-2SO feels exasperated himself. "Yes. If you alter your behavior somewhat, I can make sure the reports include the keywords that tend to result in transfer requests. It will be dangerous, but not as dangerous as your idea." Signalling friendliness will make Willix more likely to agree to it, so K-2SO curls his left hand partway through a cutout to mirror him. "When they take you from this facility, I'll make sure I'm the droid escort, and incapacitate the guards on the transport." 

Willix strokes his beard in thought. "You need me to make trouble." 

"Yes. Behavior that could be described as 'erratic,' 'aggressive,' and 'reckless' would be ideal." 

Willix nods. "I need another two or three days, and then I can do that."

Pleased that his gesture was effective, K-2SO says, "That is acceptable. I'm waiting to see if anyone noticed my test case." He tilts his head. "Are you going to tell me what _you_ need the time for?" It isn't looking likely, but asking can't hurt.

Willix shakes his head. "Not while we're still here. Better for everyone." 

K-2SO simulates a sigh. "Is there _anything_ you'll tell me?" It comes out more plaintive than he'd intended. 

Willix's expression softens, and then he does something completely unexpected: he puts his free hand on top of K-2SO's.

Time stretches out as K-2SO stares at the point of contact. Putting his hand there in the first place was a simple communication gesture; but now Willix is touching him and he doesn't know what to do.

A preliminary review of his files confirms that this kind of touching between organics is employed to begin and develop friendships. He doesn't get farther than a preliminary analysis because Willix's skin is distractingly warm against his sensors. Soft, where his fingers slot between K-2SO's.

No one has ever touched K-2SO like this before.

It's...pleasant. That doesn't make sense. No combination of pressure, texture and temperature has ever been pleasant before, or even unpleasant. Just data. 

Was this what Willix had meant to do during their first meeting? Touch K-2SO to establish or reinforce a bond?

K-2SO isn't sure he likes the fact that it's working.

Willix is talking, and K-2SO snaps his attention to his words. "I'm working on Kene, Bartann, Venko, and Na'synda. Even Pellian might be willing to join in to try to get transferred."

K-2SO doesn't like how much risk Willix can pack into just two sentences. "Do you really trust any of them not to report you?"

"Some of them, I trust their self-interest. The others, it'll be leverage. I'm working on it." 

"You've been here," K-2SO reminds him, "for fourteen days."

Willix has the nerve to roll his eyes. "I know what I'm doing."

"How am I supposed to know that?" K-2SO shifts his posture to annoyed, but he doesn't move his hand. "Willix—"

Willix's shoulders and jaw tighten. "Stop calling me that," he snaps. "It's not my name." 

K-2SO processes this. False names and aliases aren't that uncommon among prisoners; many of them have changed their names in an attempt to avoid the consequences of their actions, or to escape an unwanted life. But he's hidden his identity well: there's no list of aliases in the records of 'Dav Willix.' "What is?"

Looking like he perhaps regrets his outburst, Willix[false] opens his mouth. At the same time, an alert pings in K-2SO's feed.

"Someone's coming," K-2SO interrupts, frustration grinding through his systems. "Lie down."

Willix[false] does it without hesitation. 

K-2SO moves back into patrol position and resumes walking. When he glances down at his own hand, his infrared sensors show a faint glow of human body heat lingering there.


End file.
